1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control method for an information processing system, an information processing system, and a program. Particularly, the present invention relates to techniques for ensuring reliability and availability of an information processing system including a plurality of server apparatuses coupled to one another when failover is carried out therein.
2. Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2006-163963 discloses that: in a computer system including a plurality of servers coupled to an external disk system on a network, occurrence of a failure in an active server is detected, a reserved server having the same configuration as the active server is searched for, and access to the external disk system from the reserved server is enabled, whereby operations of the active server are taken over by the reserved server.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2005-301488 discloses an input/output interface switch (hereinafter referred to as I/O switch) which, in a computer apparatus including a plurality of CPUs and a plurality of input/output interfaces, can arbitrarily set a coupling relation of the CPUs with the input/output interfaces.
In such a computer system as described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2006-163963, a power supply to a server apparatus (hereinafter referred to as standby server apparatus) set on standby to replace a server apparatus (hereinafter referred to as active server apparatus) which is currently active is kept off for such purposes as power consumption saving while the standby server apparatus is on standby.
Consequently, it is not until failover is carried out that a fact that a failure has occurred in the standby server apparatus, a fact that a configuration, a capability or the like of the standby server apparatus is insufficient to be a destination of the is failover of the active server apparatus, or the like are found out, for example. Thereby, in some cases, troubles have arisen in operations and services.
Particularly, it is considered that, if such an I/O switch as disclosed by Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2005-301488 is introduced to the information processing system, which enables flexible changes in configuration of an information processing system, reliability and availability of the information processing system will be highly likely to be deteriorated.